1. Technical Field
The present invention pertains to electronic document routing within a network or content management system, such as the system disclosed in U.S. Pat. application Ser. No. 10/131,167, entitled “Object-Oriented Framework for Document Routing Service in a Content Management System” and filed Apr. 23, 2002, now U.S. Pat. No. 7,032,225, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. In particular, the present invention pertains to a content management system and method employing extensible workflow entities with user-defined attributes.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
A content management system basically stores content, preferably in digital form (e.g., images, videos, audio, text, etc.), and provides indexing functions in order to store and retrieve information based on various attributes. Document routing is an important and indispensable component to a content management system. Without the document routing capability, the content management system would merely become a document archival system. Document routing is similar to workflow and enables a document to be routed through various processing steps or phases in order to perform a business or other type of process. For example, when a claim is submitted to an insurance company for an auto accident, finite stages or routings are required to obtain the necessary approvals for paying the insurance claim, depending on the type of claim or damage incurred. Document routing must be capable of identifying a sequence of finite steps through which the document is routed in order to complete the claim processing.
The aforementioned patent provides an object-oriented framework for document routing service in a content management system. According to that patent, the object-oriented framework directly provides a server API set for document routing to the application programmers, without an intermediate interface (e.g.C API layer.) The object-oriented framework further defines the overall architectual design of document routing and the object model of the document routing service that includes a set of classes and associated methods to support the model. The object-oriented framework presents several advantages among which are that it provides the document routing function to users based on an object-oriented framework, and it enables application development with document routing service. with document routing service.
However, workflow functions supporting document routing in content management systems generally do not permit the workflow entities to be extensible. By way of example, IBM Content Manager Version includes two workflow entities, namely workflows and workbaskets. Since these entities include a fixed set of predefined attributes, a user is limited to the fixed attributes and is unable to customize or add user-defined attributes to the entities. For example, a workflow may include several attributes, such as an attribute indicating the name of the workflow, an attribute indicating the name of an access control list (ACL), an attribute indicating a route list of workbaskets, etc. Since an entity includes a predefined set of attributes, a user is unable to add new attributes to the workflow entity to store custom data, such as department number or owner name. Similarly, a user is unable to add new attributes to a workbasket to store custom data, such as account number and client classification, due to the predefined attributes of a workbasket. Thus, individual companies utilizing this type of content management system are required to utilize identical workflow entities even though the workflow within each company may be substantially different.